Links: May you virtualize buildings? Hunting for Antarctic bases

Saturday, June 09, 2007 (19:38 UTC)

Do Google and Microsoft have an automtic right to virtualize real buildings? The Church of England thinks Sony certainly doesn't. I think Sony does.

At the bottom of this page on the Polar View website is a KML file containing every single Antarctic base out there. It's great for finding even the best hidden bases — some of the brand-new high resolution tiles in Google Earth that look completely devoid of human habitation actually do contain a base upon closer inspection. Happy hunting.

GIS pro Steve0 likes GeoCommons. GIS pro James Fee doesn't. Lively debate ensues. My take: Neogeography is here to stay. Make room for it. Dave Bouwman puts it better.

In February 2007, a Sudanese gun-running plane crashed at El-Geneina airport. The Register carries a breathless story about how you can see the plane on Google Earth. The only problem? Turning on the Digital Globe metadata layer shows that the imagery of the airport was taken in February 2006.

Google and the JFK Bomb Plot: The Censorship Circus (Lauren Weinstein's Blog):
Calls for massive imagery censorship, presumably to blot out every conceivable terrorist target from the public's online view, have a certain appeal among those who always view the Internet and most of its users with suspicion. The logical outcome of this reasoning could vastly alter Google's imagery data storage requirements -- removing enough photos to make the lords of censorship happy would reduce the Google Earth file system to something akin to a single "404 Not Found" page.

Cato Institute's John Harper at the National Review (!):

Google “Get a Life”: Ignore the roar of the JFK plotters.
Better to concede the point: Terrorists can get the same access to payment systems, health care, shoe stores, knives, computers, photography equipment, and vitamin supplements as everyone else. Google Earth, too.
More where that came from.

ESRI ArcGIS Explorer gets a blog. I'd subscribe, but it doesn't have an RSS feed.

Extremely cool: Barnabu.co.uk uses SketchUp's accurate daylight shadow feature to create a ground overlay for his dynamic London Eye that matches the position of the ferris wheel: